About This Podcast

In this week's Fairewinds podcast Arnie Gundersen discusses recent problems at two nuclear reactors and how the NRC is failing to enforce its own laws governing those reactors. Gundersen discusses nuclear containment problems at the Ft. Calhoun reactor near Omaha and accident release rates at the San Onofre nuclear plant south of Los Angeles. In both cases, the NRC seems willing to ignore its own regulations and allow these two damaged reactors to restart.

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KH: It's December 23, 2012 and this is the Energy Education podcast. I'm Kevin. This podcast is a project of Fairewinds Energy Education. Fairewinds is a non-profit organization whose mission is to educate policy makers, the public and the next generation on matters of nuclear power and safety. Today on the show, we will discuss two US nuclear power plants that are operating beyond what they were originally designed for. We will discuss the design bases of Nebraska's Fort Calhoun plant and how original calculations that went into designing the containment support structure are now known to be flawed. We will also talk more about the San Onofre plant, what it was designed to handle and what is actually happening. Joining us to discuss these issues is Fairewinds Chief Nuclear Engineer, Arnie Gundersen. All coming up next.

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KH: All right. Joining us today by Skype is Fairewinds Chief Nuclear Engineer, Arnie Gundersen. Arnie, thanks for coming on the show again.

AG: Hey Kevin, thanks for having me and happy holidays.

KH: Let's get right to it. The topic of today's show is plants operating beyond their design bases. We have two plants that we would like to talk about: Fort Calhoun and San Onofre. Fort Calhoun is a nuclear plant in Nebraska that experienced severe flooding last year and there was some concern about that. Arnie, you were talking about that at the time. But some new information may be raising some cause for concern. Can you talk about that?

AG: Yes. Fort Calhoun has been shut down since April of 2011 because of the flood. They were looking at what did the flood do to the structure, what did it do to the foundations. Well, as part of that process, they just discovered that there were problems inside the nuclear containment and they just had a meeting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about those problems. But what is fascinating about it is that these problems that they just discovered, are not related to the flooding at all and they go back decades.

KH: So Arnie, how long ago were these plants designed? How did they plan to meet these design bases? I mean these plants were designed in the 60's and 70's, right?

AG: Yes. These plants were designed when I was in college and just out of college. This particular one, Fort Calhoun, was designed with hand calculations and slide rules in the 1960's. Now what they discovered as a result of trying to see the condition of the plant after the flood, well they discovered that those calculations from the 60's had errors, those calculations, also some of them are missing, and then some of them are just plain incomplete. We are posting the slides on the site from the NRC presentation and listeners might want to click on slide #12. But Omaha Public Power District admits, here is the quote, that there were "incorrect and incomplete or missing calculations. There were inconsistencies between the calculations and the drawings. There were incomplete consideration of all load combinations and there were simple numerical errors." Well, what did they do right back in the 60's if they had all these problems? Omaha Public Power is trying to limit the scope of this to just look at these beams inside the containment. But my god, if they had all these kinds of problems that went undetected for 5 decades now, how many other nuclear calculations should be suspect? I hope the NRC is going to ask those kinds of questions.

KH: So what we are actually looking at then are support structures in the containment, right?

AG: Yes, we are looking at the beams that hold things like the nuclear reactor up or the steam generators and the pressurizer. Yes, they are major structural beams and what they discovered is that in the normal day to day life the power plant, they will hold just fine. But if there is a pipe break, the stresses and the shaking of the system are such that those beams inside the containment are likely to fail. So the people out in Omaha are certainly thankful that there was not a nuclear accident, because if there had been, it is likely the insides of the plant would have shaken to the point where the emergency core cooling would not have worked.

KH: So this is about being able to simply hold up the weight of the reactor in the case of an accident. Now, Arnie the Omaha Public Power District is just now coming forward with this information. Are they just now learning about this?

AG: Well, the reporters who were at the public hearing where this material was presented, said that they had known about it for two decades. There is a great write-up by an organization called SimplyInfo that addresses the public hearing here. Frankly, I was dumbfounded. I mean, how can you know about incorrect, incomplete, missing calculations, numerical errors, for two decades and not do anything about it? You know, it speaks to the NRC oversight of these reactors. The NRC has resident inspectors on site. And the NRC will always say, well we have our personnel on site at all times. But the fact of the matter is, they only have two people and there is another 700 at the utility, so the resident inspectors become just box checkers. They walk around and make sure that every I is dotted and every T is crossed. But they never go back and look at these big questions like how was this plant designed and are the calculations upon which it is based, even accurate? So we are finding here at Fort Calhoun that the design bases for the plant, that all those hand calculations of a bunch of geeky engineers with slide rules back in the 60's, are wrong or missing or just they did not think the problem through fully. And yet, they are talking about starting back up in January.

KH: So there is a problem with these old calculations at the Fort Calhoun plant. There is concern that the weight-bearing structures may not be able to hold up the containment in the event of a problem. What could that mean? I mean does it just drop the containment?

AG: Yes, what it means is that, had there been an accident, had a pipe break occurred, the extra forces on the plant, not just the dead load of these things just sitting there operating, but the dynamic twists and turns of the plant as a pipe were to break, would likely have caused these things to fail. You know, they went back in and they started to look at different beams and they said well, let's look at these 6 beams and see if this is just a rare problem or is it systemic? And they looked at 6 and they found that all 6 were wrong. So it is clearly an indication of a systemic problem. And yet, this is coming out of NRC Region IV, which is the part of the NRC that handles all the nuclear plants in the western part of the country. Here is Region IV not asking the big picture questions, like, if these problems are true in this small little piece of information you are looking at, how can we be sure about all of the safety calculations you have done? I do not see those big picture questions being asked. The other big picture question is you know, you guys have known about this for two decades. Why didn't you tell us?

KH: And when you say you guys have known about this, you are talking about the staff at Fort Calhoun or the NRC?

AG: Yes, the management at Fort Calhoun apparently has known about this problem for years if not decades. And yet, the NRC is just now being made aware of it. You know, when in the nuclear industry, if an employee were to know about missing calculations or incomplete calculations or incorrect calculations and not tell immediately about these problems, they would be fired and then the NRC has a process where they are banned from the nuclear industry for 5 years. I do not see the NRC even considering that for Fort Calhoun's management. If this happened to a person, that person's career would be destroyed, but yet here Fort Calhoun let it occur for likely several decades according to SimplyInfo, and yet I do not see anybody at the NRC saying, why should we let you start back up in 2013 or even 2014 for that matter? How can we trust the management at Omaha Public Power?

KH: So all of these, well at least in this case, these old calculations, inaccuracies in these old calculations, missing information, maybe the engineers put the dot in the wrong place or forgot to carry a zero, whatever that is, do you suspect that that is limited to the Fort Calhoun plant only at this point?

AG: Well, there are two parts to that. First off, I do not think it is just limited to the containment at Fort Calhoun. Within Fort Calhoun, if they have got these problems on the beams inside the containment, I cannot imagine why they would not have problems throughout all of the calculations. But we turned a blind eye to design bases issues at other plants. So within NRC Region IV, it is not just Fort Calhoun that they are deliberately giving a "bye" to. Here is Fort Calhoun and they are saying well, we will seriously consider starting you guys up in January of 2013. We see the same behavior in NRC Region IV on San Onofre.

KH: All right, Arnie, I do want to talk about San Onofre. Before that though, I just want to touch base with you about your fundraising goals. Fairewinds has a goal of $50,000. Where are we along the way?

AG: You know, we posted a fundraiser about a month ago, trying to get enough money to move forward into 2013 and I am really gratified by the results. We are 80% there. We thought we would need about $50,000 to get through 2013 and so far, people have donated about $40,000. So we are really close to our goal. It is so gratifying to walk down to the mail and get small checks from many people who really care about the message of Fairewinds. And to those people who have sent, I really appreciate it and in the last week here before the fiscal year ends, if you have not sent, I urge you please consider sending a donation on to Fairewinds.

KH: So Arnie, moving on to San Onofre: today we are talking about design bases issues. Tell me, what is going on at San Onofre now?

AG: Well, if you are a frequent visitor to the Fairewinds site, you will know that there are about four reports up there for Friends Of The Earth about problems that the steam generators had at San Onofre. Just real quick, they replaced the steam generators and in less than a year they had multiple tube failures inside a steam generator. A steam generator is like a forest of little tubes not much bigger than your finger, but they go 30 or 40 feet high and they began to vibrate and damage each other.

KH: So just to clarify, Arnie, the steam generator tubes are carrying very hot radioactive water through non-radioactive water so they can transfer the heat but contain the radiation. Is that how it is working?

AG: My god Kevin, we are going to make an engineer out of you yet.

KH: I think you said that last week. OK, go on, so what are the problems with these tubes?

AG: OK, so what happened in January of last year, the plant sprung a leak in one of these tubes. They went back in and they did a pressure test and 8 tubes failed the pressure test. Now what that means is that had there been an accident, 8 of these tubes would have likely burst. The plant's design bases, what it is designed for, is one tube bursting. So basically, the conditions inside the plant were 8 times worse than what anybody expected, so had there been the accident, had there been this thing called a Main Steam Line Break (MSLB) accident, not 1 pipe, but at least 8 and possibly even many more, they did wind up ultimately plugging 1300 tubes, perhaps hundreds of tubes might have failed. But the important thing here, getting back to the design bases and NRC Region IV, the plant clearly was operating outside of it's design bases. It was designed for 1 tube breaking and in fact, at least 8 would have broken, if not more. Now, what that means is that all of the emergency planning structure would have been useless. We are talking about an accident that could have been 8 times worse than what the State of California is prepared to respond to. What can happen in the event of this accident is you might have to evacuate all the way out to Los Angeles and all the way down to the Mexican border. This was a big deal. When these tubes fail, they would leak about 5,000 gallons of water every minute, out of the nuclear reactor, into places where it never was designed to be. So you have got radioactive water leaving the nuclear containment and heading into places that are not designed to retain it. But more importantly, the plant is not designed to make up 5,000 gallons of water in the nuclear core. So the nuclear core might not have been cooled and you might have had a meltdown. So this problem is I think, the most significant near miss we have had in the last at least 10 years. And the NRC in Region IV is ignoring the fact that San Onofre was operating well beyond what it was designed for. Now here is what the NRC's position is on this. What the NRC in Region IV is saying is well, we know 8 tubes or more would have broken and we know it would have been a much worse accident than you can design for. But, the chance of a Main Steam Line Break was only about double. So because the probability did not go up too too much, we are going to give them a "bye", we are going to say, OK you were not really acting outside of your design bases. If the NRC had determined that it was operating outside it's design bases, they could levy a $150,000-a-day fine for the 18 months that the plant was running. It could easily add up to a billion dollar penalty. They do not want to go there.

KH: So let me try to make this a little more understandable for me. These tubes are carrying radioactive water under very high pressures in order to transfer heat and run the turbines. They planned, from what I am understanding you say, that 1 tube at the most could break. What you are telling me is that yes there is the problem of this radioactive water leaking into a non-radioactive area and that is one problem to deal with. But the main problem if 8 tubes break as opposed to the 1 tube that they planned for, is too much water would be lost and they would not be able to make up for it and cool the reactor. Is that right?

AG: That's it exactly. None of the reactor simulators are designed to handle an accident where 8 tubes break. There is simply not enough water to inject back into the nuclear reactor as it is depressurizing, in order to prevent the core from being covered, which means you know you are going to get tube failures and likely, in the case of an 8 tube rupture accident, I cannot see how a meltdown would have been, could have been converted. It is outside of what the plants are designed for and it is outside of what the operators are trained to handle.

KH: And these tubes are only about as big as a finger?

AG: Yes. They are only about as big around as your finger and they are of course 30 or 40 feet high and they have a huge ___ on the top. We have a video on the website from back in the spring, that we talk about what these tubes look like and if somebody wanted to go back, they could go back and take a look at that video. So, yes, there is a forest of these tubes, more than 9,000 of these tubes in the steam generator. They were beating each other up, hitting each other to the point where 8 were ready to fail, and did fail when San Onofre ultimately did a pressure test that would have simulated what would have happened had there been a Main Steam Line Break like that.

KH: So if 8 tubes can lose that much water, then the water traveling through these tubes must be under tremendous pressure.

AG: Oh, yes, a couple of thousand pounds per square inch.

KH: So Arnie, how does all of this then affect the emergency planning around this sort of, you know, a densely populated radius around this plant?

AG: Yes, there are 8,000,000 people living within 50 miles of the plant. Right now, the emergency plan only goes out to 10 miles. But 10 miles even includes Camp Pendleton, which is the largest marine base in the world; 50,000 marines are on that base at some times during the year. We need to think about what would be the ramifications to national security if we had to abandon Camp Pendleton? The plant itself sits right in the middle of Camp Pendleton and because of that, should there have been an accident, an evacuation of 10,000 to 50,000 marines would have been required with all their equipment left behind. From a national security standpoint, it is not something you would want. And then if you just look up the road, you wind up in big cities like Irvine, California, and a little further north than that is L.A. A little further south is San Diego. So huge cities that (have) 8,000,000 people. But equally important is that L.A. is the biggest port in the world for U.S. imports and exports. So if we had to shut down L.A. because of an accident at San Onofre, we would be effectively damaging the country perhaps irrevocably. So the consequences of the design failures by Southern California Edison at the San Onofre plant are huge. And yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is like an ostrich in the sand; they are refusing to acknowledge that if a Main Steam Line Break happened, basically every one of the systems we put in place to protect the public, would have failed.

KH: That is a lot riding on a little pipe.

AG: Yes, that is a lot riding on a little pipe and it is a lot riding on a little emergency plan.

KH: Arnie, thanks for joining us again this week.

AG: All right Kevin, thanks for having me. In spite of this gloomy news, I hope you have a happy holiday and I hope our viewers do too.

KH: All right, you too. Well, that about does it for this week's edition of the Energy Education Podcast. You can catch us back here next Sunday on www.fairewinds.org. And don't forget this December we need your help. Please make a donation at: www.fairewinds.org/images/donations. Thank you.